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April 16, 2023

Stuttering Therapy with ChatGPT

As a graduate course instructor gearing up to teach my first course in the ChatGPT era, I’ve wondered how students, novice clinicians, and clinical generalists (those without expertise with a specific clinical population) might rely on generative AI to fill in knowledge gaps and generate ideas for therapy. Speech-language pathology has an enormous scope of practice with constantly updating research, making it practically impossible for an average clinician to keep up with best practices in any one area. And if you do try to dive in to refresh your knowledge, it’s difficult to find your footing in a sea of information. 

If we start relying on tools like ChatGPT to filter through the noise and bubble up the key ideas, will this facilitate more evidence-based practice? Or will we be at risk of continuing the old mistakes, if that’s the bulk of the Internet’s text-based corpus?

With just a few weeks until class starts, I decided to test this out myself!

This post covers:

- The importance of prompts quality and asking the right questions
- Treatment planning prompts examples and responses
- Evaluation of ChatGPT output
- How to ensure evidence-based practice while using AI
- Implications for clinical educators

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January 29, 2022

Just Stop With The Damn Disfluency Counts

In this post, I will present a brief introduction to:

  1. Why disfluency counts are clinically irrelevant at best, and harmful at worst
  2. How to record physical components of stuttering in clinically relevant and helpful ways
  3. How to stop using outdated and harmful disfluency count tools at your place of work

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March 26, 2015

The Australian Budget Lidcombe Proposal Debate: A Primer in Memes

Depending on who you are, you may or may not know that there is a heated (as in, nuclear lava bomb) discussion happening internationally right now in the speech pathology-stuttering world. The discussion revolves around a federal health care budget policy recommendation that was submitted to the Australian government by Speech Pathology Australia, advocating government funding for treatment of preschool stuttering. A number of talking points have grown out of this discussion that cover ethical, political, clinical, and philosophical notions. 

So, in the spirit of fun and efficiency, I here present a brief and highly visual summary of what has transpired thus far.

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March 31, 2014

What I Do

SLPs help people improve their ability to communicate. This is a powerful statement. Ironically, I think it is a such a bold statement that its meaning is completely lost on most people. Communication is one of those abilities like walking or having opposable thumbs that we completely take for granted. Unless, of course, something about it doesn't work properly.

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December 17, 2013

Change vs. Transformation

Because I specialize in adults and teens, it's pretty rare that I am someone's first-ever speech therapist. The majority of my clients went through some form of speech therapy as a child, and a significant number have pursued subsequent rounds as an adult. Past therapy experiences range from school-based once-a-week sessions to intensive multi-week programs consisting of 8 hours of speech therapy per day.

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